The Man Who Came Back

This was a press conference for the history books. In an hour in the President's great oval office the tragicomedy of the U.S. war effort came out into the open.

Franklin Roosevelt had come back from an inspiring look at the country (see p. 15) in a critical mood. He vented his distaste for Congress (which in spite of its inclinations was just giving him inflation control), for the press (which against all its news instincts had kept totally mum about his trip) and for members of his own Administration (who had been trying to do the very best they knew how). To the three victims this was ingratitude. They felt hurt and thoroughly fed up.

Instead of a happy reunion, instead of a wave of new confidence at the appointment of Jimmy Byrnes as tsar of inflation control (see p. 18), the President's homecoming produced the ridiculous spectacle of new bitterness. It brought to the surface a fundamental conflict of temperament and methods, a conflict between Franklin Roosevelt and the men who share responsibility in the war effort, a conflict which lies at the root of their multifarious impatience with the effort itself.

Gripe at Congress. Not since Franklin Roosevelt accused the Nine Old Men of the Supreme Court of taking the U.S. back to "horse & buggy days," because they ruled NRA unconstitutional, had Franklin Roosevelt lectured so strongly and critically.

More than 100 correspondents crowded into the President's office. There was none of the usual banter: the newsmen, personally and professionally, resented the censorship--instituted by the President himself--that had barred them from one of the year's biggest news stories. Nearly twoscore of them had signed a letter of sharp protest.

The President smiled--a little grimly. He read a statement praising the nation's newspapers and radio stations for keeping his secret. He told about the trip itself: the plants he had seen, the soldiers & sailors. And then he came to his resentment.

Everywhere he had found the people's morale good, their war spirit aggressive, their work amazingly efficient. In the plants he had visited, production was about 94 or 95% of the almost impossible goals he had set up last January.

The people understood the war. The President had been around the country a lot more than most of his listeners, and he knew. But Washington did not understand. There were three situations in Washington which were not good.

First was Congress. It had delayed action on such vital legislation as the anti-inflation bill. But at the same time a lot of its members worked overtime trying to justify their place in the war effort by looking into matters that didn't concern them, and which as laymen they couldn't understand. . . .

At that moment, on Capitol Hill, Administration stalwarts sweated blood to get the President's inflation bill passed. In his demand for a law by Oct. 1, the President had put Congress on a spot. Most leaders felt that the price-control mess was as much his fault as Congress'. For a year he had done little more than they to control inflation and they felt he had passed the buck to them. And now particularly, when they had just whipped the farm bloc in a bitter battle, the President's words were like the slash of a riding crop across the face. This held not only for his own supporters in Congress but for those Republicans who had fought beside them for the sake of the nation's welfare.

Hardly had the President's words got into headlines when White House telephone wires hummed with protests from the Hill. In peacetime Congress would have flared into open rebellion and hacked the inflation bill to pieces.

Gripe at the Press. The President spoke on.

Second was the press. Some Washington journalists, especially columnists and radio commentators, had sent out stories which were simply not based on fact. They had done the country a great deal of harm. . . .

Almost every editorial page in the nation considered the two-week news blackout a dangerous precedent. The correspondents agreed that it was perfectly desirable, for the sake of the President's safety, to suppress advance information about his itinerary. But they saw no need to suppress the news of where he had been for days afterward, no need to keep all but three press-association correspondents from accompanying him.

The White House correspondents, their professional sensibilities hurt, felt they had been locked out for no good reason. Given a lecture (but refused any reason for it) instead of an explanation, they felt doubly wronged. There was a moment of blank, hurt silence. A White House aide tried to break the tension with a wisecrack. The tension was not broken.

President v. His Aides. The President spoke on.

Third was the Administration itself. Too many officials rushed into print with statements that were picturesque but not entirely true. For example: the recent speeches that production was below par and the nation was losing the war (see box). The President would like to see the statistics which were the basis of those speeches. He would never have made them himself.

Sensible, earnest Elmer Davis, who had set the tone of these official utterances and okayed one of them personally, was bound to take this as a stern rebuke. So were the speakers themselves. Many a Washington official wondered how the President, after one quick glimpse of war plants, could be so confident of his own statistics--94 or 95% of the goals--when their own charts showed a less rosy picture. Congressmen and correspondents wondered how, after his conducted tours, he could be so sure that he knew better than anyone the temper of the people.

But there was a deeper, stronger undercurrent in official Washington. To many an official it seemed that the Government's lack of organization for war had reached a crisis. If there was a real program of strategy for beating the Axis, few men in Washington knew about it. Certainly it had not been geared to industrial strategy: the Army & Navy had started by ordering everything they could think of, including men, and the schedules had not yet been trimmed to fit the realities of material and manpower. In the President's absence, some of his soberest advisers had grown desperate: they wanted to lay the whole picture before him, to point to the terrible urgency for military and production strategy and a swift program of manpower control. Instead the President had come back to lay his picture before them. To these men, the President's optimism was a rebuke in advance.

Country v. Washington. The President spoke on.

The country had the right kind of community spirit. If only Congress, Washington newsmen and Administration officials would emulate the country's example. . . .

Throughout the hour-long conference, the tension had mounted. It was hot in the crowded room: sweat dripped from the correspondents' foreheads and soaked through their coats. There had been no jesting, no laughter; the President's voice had turned edgy.

This time the correspondents did not wait for a man in the front row to signal the end of the conference. Someone shouted the usual "Thank you, Mr. President" from the rear. The President, not hearing, went on talking while his audience started to depart. Somewhere deep in the U.S. Government there was a bad case of misunderstanding.

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